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Street Life

The evening is turning into onion skins.

On the road outside the torn-poster theatre are four boys flapping around a tiny bottle like birds around a bird-feed. Each boy has a piece of folded-over muslin that’s stuffed into the wells of their tiny fists. The eldest of the four pours a jerky stream of viscous white liquid into each fist.

The boys bunch the muslin into bolster shapes, slide the shapes further into their fists and start to suck on them. Their inhalations are deep and purposeful as if their small fists are hand-shaped cigars.

Soon their eyes are floating in dream fluid. Their smiles have widened. Their world feels like a movie screen. They are no more outside the torn-poster theatre.

Bad-tempered cows have grown wings and are now sitting on trees munching fresh leaves. The pineapple truck outside the juice shop has become a space ship throwing hand grenades. “Can I have one to blow up your wife,” the littlest boy shouts at the guy unloading the pineapples.

The road is a black river. Wheels have turned into propellers. Some boats have tabla-players, others have musclemen whipping mean and oily shopkeepers.

The torn poster of the theatre has become unstuck. It’s flying now. The sexy FIRST LOVE heroine has taken off her bathrobe and her young lover has drowned in the black river.

The boys are singing randy bedroom songs. The hunger of their growing stomachs has evapourated. They’ve smoked their hand-shaped cigars down to the last drags.

Forgotten in the midst of all this frolicking, lies a tiny bottle of ERASEX, the white ink that removes typos and other minor errors.